Shocker! There’s a Truly Terrible Staff Turnover Rate at the Trump White House

The revolving door at the Trump White House has been a matter of public fascination since President Trump fired acting attorney general Sally Yates for refusing to uphold his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. It continued when he dismissed national security adviser Michael Flynn less than a month into his tenure. And, also, that time he gave communications director Anthony Scaramucci the boot after a whopping 10 days. But new research now confirms what we already knew: It’s incredibly tough to hold down a job in the Trump White House. According to a paper by the Brookings Institution, more than one in three Trump administration staff members have left in the president’s first year—whether by firing, resignation, or ambiguous exit. That’s a higher rate of turnover than in the past five administrations—“more than triple that of [Barack] Obama and double that of [Ronald] Reagan.”

In particular, paper author Kathryn Dunn Tenpas notes that Trump has struggled to retain his inner circle of advisers—with six of the 12 VIP, “Tier One” positions turning over in the president’s first year, including chief of staff Reince Priebus, deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, press secretary Sean Spicer, and Flynn. For reference, Tenpas notes that while some staff turnover is common in the first year of a new president’s White House, the churning under Trump far surpasses that of his predecessors: In his first year, “Obama lost one adviser from Tier One (Greg Craig, White House counsel),” Tenpas writes, “and George W. Bush did not see any turnover in these high-level positions.”

Why wouldn’t people want to work for a boss as rational and supportive as Donald Trump? How could they possibly fall short of what one can only assume are his perfectly reasonable standards? The paper has two answers for these somewhat rhetorical questions: One, Trump hired chiefly for loyalty—not government experience. “The absence of prior White House experience among the ranks of the senior staff was glaring,” Tenpas writes. See: tasking his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a real-estate scion with more than a billion of dollars of debt, with creating peace in the Middle East—or the general presence of Omarosa Manigault Newman. “Such inexperience may have led to poor performance and a slew of first-year departures.”

Secondly, and entirely unsurprisingly, the Brookings paper found that the terrible turnover rate in the Trump White House was a result of the overallclusterfuckery (our term) of the past year—from the Russia investigation to the threat of conflict with North Korea to the administration’s failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, this was not the most placid working environment. “Amidst this troubling backdrop, it is not difficult to see why there may have been a great deal of turnover among the senior ranks,” the paper notes.

Tenpas writes that, historically, year-two recruitment is a challenging task, but in this particularly rocky White House, “some Republicans might be less eager to send their résumés to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Any takers? Perks include: a front-row seat to history and, probably, a future book deal! As for the occupational hazards: occasionally being bullied by your boss in front of the whole world; the likelihood of being remembered as aiding a deeply treacherous administration; and, of course, if the past is any indication, getting ousted within the year.